To avoid costly damage, wet carpeting materials must be dried in a timely and effective manner. Left wet too long, or not completely dried, carpeting materials can be ruined by mildew. To deal with this problem, many carpet drying techniques have been developed.
Carpet cleaning machines have been used in a suction mode to remove water from carpeting materials. However, water damage to carpets is often caused by flooding or water leaks that tend to penetrate to the bottom of the carpeting, into both the pad and carpet backing. Removing enough water to be truly effective with a carpet cleaning machine would be difficult at best. Any substantial amount of water left beneath or within the carpeting materials can easily destroy the materials over a short period of time.
High-powered fans have been employed to blow streams of air over the carpeting materials to increase the evaporation rate of the water in the carpet. However, this method is not very effective in completely drying the carpeting.
Removal of carpeting materials for drying has also been employed. This method can effectively dry the carpeting materials, but is substantially more difficult, and therefore, expensive to perform.
Finally, blowers have been used to dry wet carpeting by blowing very high volumes of air between the carpet and the padding. The outlet with a high capacity blower is positioned between the bottom of the carpet and the top of the pad, with the carpet typically overlying or flopped over at least part of the blower housing. However, even with this method, difficulties often arise. One difficulty that severely decreases the effectiveness of this method is the tendency of the carpet to be blown off or away from the blower, precluding a strong air flow from being maintained between the carpeting materials. This problem can occur if a high-powered blower produces sufficient force to blow the carpet off or away from the blower, allowing air to spill out around the blower instead of being forced under the carpet. Solutions to this problem have been attempted, including attaching a fork-like appendage on which to stick the carpet, to the head of the blower housing. Not only can this fork-like appendage be a dangerous protrusion and damage the carpeting, but it also does not tightly hold the carpet to the blower outlet to effectively channel the air flow. In addition, the carpet does not always remain on the forked appendage. Another device to hold the carpet uses a spring-loaded wire clamp attached to the blower. The wire clamp pushes down over the blower outlet in an effort to hold the carpet therebetween. The ability of this mechanism to effectively grip the carpet is marginal at best. Also, if a spring is used that is stiff enough to hold the carpet to the blower outlet, the difficulty of manually retracting the spring to safely and effectively place the carpet beneath the spring is increased substantially.
In consideration of the limitations and disadvantages of the device currently in use, it should be apparent that an effective solution to the problem of drying wet carpeting materials by being able to easily secure a wet carpet to a blower is not provided in the known prior art. Accordingly, the present invention was developed, and it provides significant advantages over previous devices for securing and drying carpeting materials.